Jeff Weintraub

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Should the Iraqi Jewish Archive get sent back to Baghdad? (continued)

As I've already indicated, I believe strongly that the answer to that question is no. I signed THIS PETITION at Avaaz.Org, and I urge others to sign it, too:

"I call upon the US government NOT to return the Jewish archive to Iraq. To do so would compound the injustice done to the Jews of Iraq, whose property it was before they were robbed of it through a deliberate state policy of persecution and ethnic cleansing. The archive should be returned to its rightful owners and assured of proper care and
conservation. We suggest it should go to Israel, where the greatest concentration of Jews of Iraqi descent are to be found."

For some further information, explanation, and consideration of the moral and legal issues involved, see here & here & here.

Last week the London-based blogger, journalist, and activist Lyn Julius, who posted the on-line petition quoted above, wrote a Huffington Post piece that forcefully restates the case against sending the Iraqi Jewish Archive back to Baghdad. You can read it below.

=> The public protests against this move have begun to get some results. On January 16 a (carefully formulated) US Senate resolution was introduced by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), with 9 co-sponsors from both parties, calling for the US government "to renegotiate with the government of Iraq the provisions of the original agreement [...] to ensure that the Iraqi Jewish Archive be kept in a place where its
long-term preservation can be guaranteed" and where it will be "accessible to scholars and to Iraqi Jews and their descendants [....]" And back in November Iraq's ambassador to the US hinted at the possibility of a potentially workable compromise solution that would involve leaving the archive in the US on some kind of indefinite long-term loan.

I hope some kind of pragmatic solution can, in fact, be negotiated. But the only reason why the Iraqi government—and, for that matter, the US government—might be willing to be flexible and accommodating in this matter is that a certain amount of political pressure has been mobilized to support the moral case against returning the Iraqi Jewish Archive to Iraq. And a great deal would depend on how the details of any potential agreement got worked out. So it's important for that political pressure to be maintained and increased. So if you haven't already signed the petition, please consider doing so. And contact your Senator's office.

One day in 1984, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to Bataween synagogue, one of the last working houses of Jewish prayer in Baghdad. The men carted off a trove of books and documents retrieved from Jewish homes, schools and synagogues. The material had been deposited for safe keeping in the ladies' gallery. The few remaining Jews were aghast to see the archive driven away in trucks from under their noses.

Ten years have elapsed since the US military discovered 2,700 Jewish books and 10,000 documents in the waterlogged basement of Saddam's secret police headquarters in Baghdad. But the restoration work could not be done on the spot, and the provisional government (CPA) decided to ship the ' Iraqi-Jewish archive', as it became known, out to the US. The CPA signed an agreement promising that the archive would be returned as soon as the restoration was complete.

The archive was taken to the National archives depot in Texas and vacuum-freeze-dried. The US State Department has since spent over $3 million stabilizing, digitizing, photographing and cataloguing the material. Archivists worked painstakingly to save what they could, prizing pages apart, removing mould and watermarks, re-gluing and sometimes sewing bindings by hand.

Some 24 items were selected for display at the National Archives building in Washington DC, an incongruous sight alongside the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The Discovery and Recovery exhibition attracted 16,000 visitors, a record for a temporary exhibition. The exhibition re-opens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York on 5 February.

Among the key items are a 400-year-old Hebrew Bible; a 200-year-old Talmud from Vienna; a copy of the book of Numbers in Hebrew published in Jerusalem in 1972; a scroll of Esther; a Haggadah edited by the chief rabbi of Baghdad; holy writings published in Venice in 1568; a copy of Ethics of the Fathers, published in Livorno, Italy in 1928 with commentary written in Judeo-Arabic; a calendar with lists of duties and prayers for each holy day printed in Baghdad in 1972; a collection of rabbi's sermons printed in Germany in 1692; thousands of books printed in Vienna, Livorno, Jerusalem, Izmir, and Vilna; miscellaneous communal records from 1920-1953; lists of male Jewish residents, school records, financial records, applications for university admissions. This archive does not have great rarity value and the handwritten notes in the margins are more precious. But all in all, it is a unique record of Iraqi-Jewish history of primary interest to the Jews to whom the books belong - many of whom are still alive.

On a chilly December morning, in the presence of Iraqi government officials, the World Organisation of Jews from Iraq held a ceremony to bury unusable or pasool fragments of Torah scrolls at a Jewish cemetery in the aptly-named town of West Babylon, NY.

But the rest of the archive is scheduled to go back when the digitizing process is complete - probably in June 2014.

The prospective return of the Iraqi-Jewish archive has sent Iraqi Jews into paroxysms of outrage. US Jewish organisations, congressmen and senators have raised their voices in indignation. Several articles have appeared in the mainstream press and media calling for the archive not to go back to Iraq. Nearly 10,000 people have signed a petition.

Iraq is adamant: It wants the archive back. "They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years," said Samir Sumaidaie, the former Iraqi ambassador to the United States. "It is time for our property to be repatriated."

Repatriated? That assumes that the archive was Iraq's property to begin with. There is a bitter irony in Iraq, which has driven its pre-Islamic Jewish community to extinction, having dispossessed them on the way out, demanding the return of 'its property'. It should be noted that the US shipped tens of thousands of documents out of Iraq after its invasion, but the forlorn and random reminders of Iraq's Jewish community are the only documents Iraq is insisting must be returned.

Legally, the US government did the correct thing to sign an agreement. Morally, it was a singular act of blindness.

The archive is the cultural property of the Iraqi-Jewish community, and save for five Jews still in Baghdad out of a community of 140,000, Jews no longer live in Iraq, but in Israel and the West. To return the archive to Iraq would be like 'returning stolen property to the Nazis'.

[JW: It's not clear who first used that formulation, but it has become common among people who strongly oppose returning the archive to Iraq. I think that if Iraq were still ruled by the fascist dictatorship of the Ba'ath Party, the analogy would be more precise than it is now. But the destruction of Iraq's historic Jewish community was not exclusively or even primarily the work of the Ba'athist regime—that process began in the 1940s and was mostly completed by 1951, a decade and a half before the Ba'athists took power. And it's also true that post-WWII Germany accepted legal and moral responsibility for returning art works and other cultural objects looted by the Nazis. So the analogy does capture something significant about the issues involved here.]

When Iraq did have a Jewish community, the regime took every step to persecute and destroy it. What is there to stop Iraq losing interest in the archive the minute it arrives back on Iraqi soil? Or more likely - selling the items off on the international market to the highest bidder?

There are practical objections to return, too. Despite assurances to the contrary, Iraq itself does not have the resources to conserve and store the archive safely. Daily bombings and the advance of Al-Qaeda on Iraqi soil hardly inspire confidence.

Even if the archive is digitized and accessible online, Iraq's Jews and their descendants, 90 percent of whom are in Israel, will be debarred from access to the original documents.

The issue of the archive not only draws attention to the mass spoliation of nearly a million Jews driven from the Arab world, but is a test case. Here at last is a unique opportunity to return Jewish property to its rightful owners. Will the US take it up?

Invitation to sign a public statement of principles defending academic freedom against "boycotts", blacklists, and other threats from various directions

For over a decade there has been a persistent campaign to institute a blacklist—misleadingly and euphemistically described as a "boycott"—of Israeli academia. Its goal is to stigmatize Israeli academics as a group and exclude them from international
academic and intellectual life (with possible exceptions for individuals who actively express
politically acceptable views) as a way of putting pressure on Israel. Over time, in response to objections, some supporters of this campaign have tried to pretend—or have persuaded themselves—that the aim is confined to instituting a "purely institutional boycott" that (somehow) doesn't affect actual people. But even when those claims are not simply disingenuous, in practice that is not a genuinely workable distinction. (Some brief and cogent explanations of why that's true are here & here & here & here & here.) And at all events, even the most carefully disguised "boycott" measures emanating from this campaign violate one of the key constitutive norms for the whole structure of academic freedom—namely, that academics and academic institutions should should not be punished for the actions of their governments.

At the same time, academic freedom in Israeli universities has also been threatened by hostile political forces in Israel itself, and ideological passions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have generated threats to academic freedom in other places and from sources on all sides of this conflict.

=> There are many reasons why this boycott/blacklist campaign is a bad and pernicious idea. I won't try to spell them all out here. But one consideration should be decisive by itself, whatever one's views on Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and related issues. It is a striking example of what Julien Benda called the "treason of the intellectuals"—that is, assaults by intellectuals on their own fundamental interests and vocation—and a violation of the basic guild obligations of academia. It should not be hard for academics to grasp that blacklisting other
academics because of their nationality and/or their affiliations attacks
a key foundation of academic freedom. If academics themselves make it clear that they don't take seriously the most fundamental principles of academic freedom and open intellectual exchange, then why on earth should we expect anyone else to take them seriously? And taking those principles seriously also requires defending them against threats from all sources and directions.

Fortunately, the American Studies Association's academic "boycott" resolution has been condemned by a wide range of American universities and academic associations (a useful list, periodically updated, is here). That's encouraging, but it would be a mistake to feel complacent. These dangerous tendencies need to be fought on several fronts—and fought in the right ways, according to the right principles.

=> A few of us, spearheaded by my friend Sam Fleischacker of the University of Illinois in Chicago, have set up an on-line petition intended to affirm the basic principles of academic freedom and open intellectual exchange in a non-partisan way that disentangles them from opposing positions regarding the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, Zionism vs. anti-Zionism, etc. Let me emphasize that this statement does not express a position on any of those larger political and ideological conflicts. And it is not primarily intended to serve as a petition per se, aimed at a specific recipient, but as a public declaration of principles.

=> I urge anyone concerned with the defense of academic freedom and open intellectual exchange to join in endorsing this public statement of principles. Follow this link, read the statement, and look for the tab labeled "Sign the Petition".

We, the undersigned, urge our colleagues in the United States and across the world not to use the politics of the Israel/Palestine conflict to undermine academic freedom.

We are dismayed by the international campaign calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, manifested recently in the boycott resolution passed by the American Studies Association.

We do not agree that there is a meaningful distinction between boycotting universities and blacklisting individual scholars, nor do we think that universities should be held responsible for government policies.

Academic freedom means that the pursuit of knowledge is based on the merit of ideas, not on the nationality of scholars or their institutional homes, and not on the zealousness of political beliefs, no matter how fervently held. When academics themselves take the initiative to attack or undermine these principles, the results can be especially corrosive.

Academic boycotts are not the only danger to academic freedom linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the threats come from both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel constituencies.

We are opposed to attempts to intervene in tenure cases on political grounds, whether with public fanfare, such as campaigns by pro-Israel groups to block the tenure of pro-Palestinian academics at Barnard College in New York and De Paul University of Chicago, or by the sometimes quieter, but no less pernicious, practices of discrimination in some departments by pro-Palestinian academics against scholars who support Israel.

The irony is that some who decry the attempt to boycott Israeli academic institutions are themselves undermining academic freedom. The Israel Ministry of Education did so when it attempted in 2012 to close a department at Ben Gurion University on patently political grounds. Some pro-Israel groups in the United States do so when they threaten or take legal action against American universities for anti-Israel political speech.

Partisans on all sides of this conflict seem increasingly willing to sacrifice the principles of academic freedom and, more generally, of the free expression and exchange of ideas. We call on our colleagues to resist this tendency, whatever their views of the conflict itself. Boycotts, blacklists, politically motivated interventions in tenure, and attempts to stifle speech do not belong in the university. They set an ominous precedent that can be used by intolerant and repressive movements of all sorts in the future. Everyone who values freedom should stand up against them.

Hamden Rice explains "what Martin Luther King actually did"

This passionate, acute, and illuminating piece was written back in August 2011, but it hasn't stopped being timely. I was moved by it, and I urge others to read it and reflect on it, too. You can read the whole thing here, but I've reproduced most of it below.

I do feel the need to add some caveats and qualifications. By framing his piece in terms of what Martin Luther King "actually accomplished," Hamden Rice may actually be obscuring part of its central message. What he's really talking about, as he points out himself during his discussion, are the accomplishments of the southern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, or at least one very important dimension of what it accomplished. King obviously played a crucial leadership role in that movement, but it was not a one-man show. It was a movement of collective self-emancipation, made possible only by the active, courageous, cooperative, and disciplined participation of thousands of men and women (and children). Through their active participation in this movement they not only helped to transform the world around them, but also transformed themselves in deeply empowering ways. And that process of self-transformation and self-empowerment was part of what enabled them to change the world around them. That's really Rice's central point here—and it's an important one..

I would also say that some of the conclusions Rice draws are overstated and one-sided. But I think that's OK, if only because his discussion does help to bring out something significant about the southern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that is too often misunderstood or forgotten—it was a political movement, not just an accumulation of individual acts of "passive resistance"; and the strategy of "non-violent direct action" promoted by Martin Luther King was a profoundly political strategy. (For some partial elaboration, I also recommend reading Juan Williams's reflections in 2005 on Rosa Parks as a political activist, which I picked up in a post I titled Tocqueville in Alabama.) Of course, passing laws (and enforcing them) is an essential part of politics. But political life, especially a politics of democratic citizenship, also encompasses a lot more.

This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective.

The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished. [....]

I remember that many years ago, when I was a smart ass home from
first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my
father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and
black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X,
probably for the second time.

A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were
talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, "peasant" origin,
although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was
from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent
two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step
grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove,
no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, pot belly stoves for heat in the
winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung,
chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or
car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements,
and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not
have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh
grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he
had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of
World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.

They lived in a valley or hollow or "holler" in which all the
landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk
to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell
across the valley, "Heeeyyyy Taaaaft," and you could see him far, far in
the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back.

On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in
isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave
the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied.
By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six
generations (going back, according to oral rendering of our genealogy,
to Africa Jones and Mama Suki), much more under slavery than under
freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had
inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns.

Anyway that's background. I think we were kind of typical as African Americans in the pre Civil Rights era went.

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin
Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm
X's message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn't that he
disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn't accomplished
anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin
Luther King accomplish other than giving his "I have a dream speech."

Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because
at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty
much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King
accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched."
I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that
Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin
Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late
father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the
U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what
my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh
from seeing "The Help," may not understand what this was all about. But
living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos
of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and
buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights
movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering
in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same
fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them.
You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that
white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could
not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the
system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for
black people.

White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black
men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With
the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men
of "assault," which could be anything from rape to not taking off one's
hat, to "reckless eyeballing."

This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father's
memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my
father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent
the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I
remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side
by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached
on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my
father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for
some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any
white lady.

This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.

I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles
and cousins gathered around my grandparent's vast breakfast table laden
with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house
with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of
weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then
to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self educated,
articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to
avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only
looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were
furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so,
something that even a child could understand.

This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.

If you didn't get taught such things, let alone experience them, I
caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs
exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.

The question is, how did Dr. King do this -- and of course, he didn't do it alone.

(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this
reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who
founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of non-violent
resistance, and taught the practices of non violent resistance.)

So what did they do?

They told us: -- whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and
try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your
name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we'll be OK.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst,
collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it
wasn't that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating
-- from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department
hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their
heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.

And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn't that bad.

.[JW: Actually, this was far from "the worst of the worst [....] that white people could dish out". In other periods of the history of the post-Civil War American south, white supremacists dished out a lot worse than they did during the 1950s and 1960s, which were brutal enough. But Rice's basic point is on-target. Black people had to act together to break free of a pervasive system of fear, intimidation, and humiliation.]

Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicked on them, had fire hoses
sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened? These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south.
Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a
deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they
beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young
people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This
is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the
era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was
taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were
mostly illusory and that we were free.

So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent,
non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like
ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy,
promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his
main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved,
unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a
convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through
that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not
accomplished.

That is what Dr. King did -- not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.

Once the beating was over, we were free.

It wasn't the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid.
So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on
this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as
they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had
done. [....]

[JW: Alas, those conclusions are greatly overstated and misleadingly one-sided, to put it mildly But that's excusable, since Rice does capture a part of the truth than can help correct another one-sided picture.]

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Richard Nixon on Philip Roth & the Jews

Here is an interesting and illuminating, though not surprising, passage in Adam Mars-Jones's LRBreview essay on a recent book about Philip Roth, Roth Unbound. (Thanks to Jeet Heer for the tip.)

Revelations from the White House tapes made it clear that Roth's brilliantly effective satire of Nixon and his inner circle in his 1971 book Our Gang really caught their attention, and they were irate. One recorded discussion between Nixon and Haldeman offers an intriguing blend of artistic, social-psychological, and ethno-political analysis. (Among other things, the first two lines of this exchange beautifully sum up almost two centuries of stereotypes about "Jewish art" and the "Jewish temperament".)

One of the high points of Roth Unbound is the extract from the tapes (recorded on 3 November 1971) in which Nixon considers his anti-Roth strategy:

NIXON: Roth of course is a Jew.

HALDEMAN: Oh yes … he’s brilliant in a sick way.

NIXON: Oh, I know –

HALDEMAN: Everything he’s written has been sick …

NIXON: A lot of this can be turned to our advantage … I think the anti-Semitic thing can be, I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew.

HALDEMAN: Is he?

NIXON: He’s pushy …

HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t.

Haldeman was on-target there in all respects—though, of course, Nixon definitely had some Jewish supporters, both inside and outside his administration, including loyal aides. And it's still true that there are "a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews" (especially if we're thinking on a global scale). Some philo-semites too, of course, but there's little doubt that the anti-semites heavily outnumber them. We seem to annoy a lot of people, for some reason.

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Erdogan Agonistes – Will the AK Party and the Turkish Army join forces against the Gulenists?

When the question in the heading first occurred to me a few days ago, it was in a half-facetious spirit. But now it's beginning to look less fanciful. Just when it seemed that the inner machinations of the political crisis in Turkey couldn't get any more weird, they did. And it's clearer than ever that from the perspective of Erdogan and his supporters, the conflict with the Gulenists has definitely escalated to the level of all-out, no-holds-barred political warfare. Here are two straws in the wind:

Turkey’s military demanded a retrial for army officers convicted of plotting to topple the government, claiming the evidence was fabricated, media reports said Thursday. [....]

The move comes amid a growing political crisis sparked by a corruption probe that the government claims is a plot being waged against it by an organization with close links to the police and judiciary. [....]

In 2013, former army chief Gen. Ilker Basbug was jailed for life and scores of army officers, journalists and lawyers were imprisoned for their role in the so-called “Ergenekon” conspiracy, an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In 2012, more than 300 active and retired military officers were sentenced to prison terms of up to 20 years in a trial that ruled that an army exercise in 2003, codenamed “Sledgehammer,” was an undercover coup plot against Erdogan’s Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP). [....]

In its official complaint, the army said the evidence used in the trials against it had been fabricated and manipulated.

Police, prosecutors and judges handling the two cases ignored charges by defense lawyers that the evidence was fake, according to press reports.

However, the saga over the military trials has taken a new twist in the escalating feud between Erdogan’s government and the movement headed by US-exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Erdogan’s top political adviser Yalcin Akdogan suggested last month that those who took action against the army were also those orchestrating the high-level corruption investigation against key government allies.

“Those who plotted against their country’s national army, intelligence, bank and the civilian government which won the heart of the nation know very well that they are not working for the good of this country,” Akdogan said in a column in the pro-government Star newspaper.

[JW: Given the source of the accusation, this rhetorical package--which lumps together the army, the security services, and the AKP government as victims of Gulenist conspiracies--is a bit astonishing. Akdogan is clearly willing to ignore the political risks involved in de-legitimizing the sweeping purge of the Army high command and the Kemalist "deep state" apparatus with which the AKP is inextricably associated.]

He was apparently referring to Gulen’s followers, who hold key positions within the police and the judiciary. [....]

Erdogan’s government has accused the Gulen movement of acting as a “state within state” by instigating the corruption probe.

Gulen, who left Turkey for the United States in 1999 after being accused of plotting to form an Islamic, has denied being involved in the investigation. [....]

Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has said he would not oppose the retrial of hundreds of military officers convicted of plotting a coup to overthrow the government a decade ago.

His comments come after the military last week filed a criminal complaint over the 2012-2013 trials, saying some of the evidence against officers had been fabricated.

"Our position on a retrial is a favorable one," Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul late on Sunday evening.

"There is not a problem for us about retrials as long as the legal basis is established. In terms of regulations, we are ready to do what we can," he added.

In 2013, former army chief General Ilker Basbug was jailed for life and a large number of army officers, journalists and lawyers received other prison sentences for their role in the so-called "Ergenekon" conspiracy, an alleged plot to overthrow Erdogan's government.

And in 2012, more than 300 active and retired military officers were sentenced to prison terms after the court ruled that an army exercise in 2003, codenamed "Sledgehammer," was also an undercover coup plot against the government.

The mass trials are widely thought to have been masterminded by the powerful movement of Fethullah Gulen, a self-exiled Muslim cleric living in the US state of Pennsylvania. [....]

But Erdogan's ruling AKP party has since become embroiled in a bitter feud with Gulen's Hizmet brotherhood over government plans to shut down its network of schools.

Erdogan's backers now accuse Gulen of orchestrating a probe into corruption within the government that has led to the resignation of three cabinet members and created a situation of political turmoil. Gulen denies any involvement with the scandal.

Erdogan claims the corruption investigation is a plot by internal and foreign enemies to topple his government, and has reacted by purging the police - which he once backed as a counterbalance to the military.

Media commentators have interpreted the latest moves to review the coup trials as a new de-facto alliance between Erdogan and the army against Gulen's movement. [....]

Interesting, if true. The repercussions could be wide-ranging. Then again, all this remains speculative. Stay tuned ...

Friday, January 03, 2014

Did Kim Jong Un execute his uncle by feeding him to a pack of ravenous dogs?

Not long ago a very high-ranking member of North Korea's ruling elite, Jang Song Thaek, was suddenly purged and executed. In a hyper-Stalinist regime like North Korea's, that sort of thing seem normal enough. But it appears that the method of his execution may have been a little exotic, at least in the context of a 21st-century government shake-up:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party. [....] Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported that Jang and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 hunting hounds which had been starved for five days.

Is that story true? I have no idea. Perhaps it's just lurid propaganda. But two things about this incident do strike me as interesting.

First, given what we know—and don't know—about North Korea and its ruling circles, this story doesn't seem inherently implausible. I'm not saying that it necessarily happened, just that it doesn't sound obviously impossible. That's significant in itself.

Second, it's intriguing, and possibly significant, that this story appeared in a Chinese newspaper. True, the newspaper is published in Hong Kong rather than China proper, but it's identified as "a mouthpiece for China's Communist Party." Far from being an enemy of the North Korean regime, China is its indispensable patron and supporter. But North Korea can also be a very irritating client. I've read several accounts suggesting that the Chinese government may have been especially taken aback by the execution of .Jang Song Thaek, since he was one of the figures in the North Korean elite with whom they had especially good relations (and, indeed, some speculate that this may have been one of the reasons he got purged). Perhaps this article was a way of signaling displeasure.

If so, my (highly non-expert) guess is that it did not alarm Kim Jong Un and his circle in the slightest. They no doubt feel confident that, no matter how upset the Chinese government gets, it is not going to stop propping them up with economic subsidies and other forms of support. The fact that North Korea is a thoroughly dysfunctional economic basket case with a hermetically isolated, paranoid, and rigidly un-reformable regime is, paradoxically, one of the regime's major assets. What most terrifies the Chinese government, along with a number of other governments, is the prospect of a North Korean collapse—which could generate unpredictable chaos on a massive scale, millions of refugees, and other unpleasant consequences.

Why, therefore, would a newspaper linked to the Chinese Communist Party want to publicly advertise the pathological weirdness of its North Korean client regime? (That's quite separate from the question of whether or not this particular story is accurate or fabricated.) This NBC News report offers the following speculation:

The newspaper has acted as a mouthpiece for China's Communist Party. The report may be a sign of the struggle between those in the party who want to remain engaged with North Korea and those who would like to distance themselves from Kim's regime.

Is that informed analysis, guesswork, or wishful thinking? Who knows? You can read the story and ponder for yourself what it means.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. Anyone interested in the question of what actually happened to Jang Song Thaek might want to read Max Fisher's characteristically thorough and well-reasoned debunking of this report: "No, Kim Jong Un probably didn’t feed his uncle to 120 hungry dogs". (Thanks to James Jesudason for the tip.) Apparently, the Hong Kong newspaper that ran this story has a reputation for being sensationalist and unreliable, and that's just one of several reasons for being skeptical. Also, the number 120 did seem excessive. However, one can't help noting that Fisher feels compelled to hedge by including the word "probably": "The only problem [with this story] is that it's probably – probably – not true." With North Korea, you never know for sure.

BEIJING -- North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party.

The man who was believed to be in charge of training his young nephew to take over was executed as a traitor, indicating a shake-up in Kim Jong Un's regime. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

Jang Song Thaek, who had been considered Kim's second-in-command, was executed last month after being found guilty of "attempting to overthrow the state," North Korea’s state-run news agency reported.

The official North Korean account on Dec. 12 did not specify how Jang was put to death.

U.S. officials told NBC News on Friday that they could not confirm the reports. "This is not ringing any bells here," said one senior official.

Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported that Jang and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 hunting hounds which had been starved for five days.

Kim and his brother Kim Jong Chol supervised the one-hour ordeal along with 300 other officials, according to Wen Wei Po. The newspaper added that Jang and other aides were "completely eaten up."

The newspaper has acted as a mouthpiece for China's Communist Party. The report may be a sign of the struggle between those in the party who want to remain engaged with North Korea and those who would like to distance themselves from Kim's regime.

Jang was seen by many experts as a regent behind North Korea's Kim dynasty and a key connection between the hermit nation and its ally China.

In the highly scripted execution, North Korea accused him of "attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state."

Kim's government also accused him of of corruption, womanizing, gambling and taking drugs, and referred to him as "despicable human scum."

Jang was married to Kim's aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, the younger sister of Kim Jong Il.

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Freedom of expression and freedom of conscience in Saudi Arabia – Raif Badawi continues to ponder the dangers of blogging

An update from Mick Hartley on the continuing saga of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi:

In July Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was reported to have been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for “setting up a website that undermines general security” and ridiculing Islamic religious figures.

A judge in Saudi Arabia has recommended that imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi go before a high court on a charge of apostasy, which would carry the death penalty upon conviction, according to Badawi's wife.

Ensaf Haidar initially told CNN on Wednesday that her husband had been sentenced to death. She later clarified to CNN that a judge has recommended he be tried for denouncing Islam, or apostasy. Apostasy carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International....

Badawi's legal troubles started shortly after he started the Free Saudi Liberals website in 2008. He was detained for one day and questioned about the site. Some clerics even branded him an unbeliever and apostate.

Human rights groups accuse Saudi authorities of targeting activists through the courts and travel bans. Amnesty International has said Badawi's "is clear case of intimidation against him and others who seek to engage in open debates about the issues that Saudi Arabians face in their daily lives."...

Badawi's wife and the couple's three children now live in Lebanon.

Whether or not Badawi actually winds up getting executed, the most important piece of information in this story is a taken-for-granted feature of the situation, namely that apostasy—specifically, turning against Islam—is a crime in Saudi Arabia, and in principle a capital crime.

This situation is not unique to Saudi Arabia, It's true that few other countries countries match the extreme levels of legally institutionalized religious intolerance found Saudi Arabia, where public manifestations of any non-Muslim religion are strictly prohibited (and adherents of non-Wahhabi forms of Islam are tolerated to a degree but are also targets of systematic discrimination and intermittent persecution). But in a large number of Muslim-majority countries—not all of them, but a sizable proportion—converting from Islam to another religion is, at the very least, legally problematic (as carefully documented, for example, in Ann
Mayer's excellent and totally non-Islamophobic book Islam and Human Rights). It is perfectly OK to convert from a non-Muslim religion to Islam, of course, but converting from Islam to another religion can get you into serious legal trouble (here's one relatively mild example) and/or make you a target for unofficial violence (which is likely to go unpunished). And in several of these countries, including Iran (which happens to be much more religiously tolerant than Saudi Arabia, despite discrimination against non-Muslim minorities and the ferocious persecution of some of them, like the Baha'i), Muslims who convert to Christianity do get charged with apostasy and face possible execution.

Furthermore, getting legally charged with apostasy doesn't necessarily require actual conversion. Sometimes it's enough to advance interpretations of Islam that some people find insufficiently orthodox, or to express views that are deemed excessively secular or anti-clerical. In most cases, such actions merely trigger charges of blasphemy (which can be lethal enough), but in other cases they can get you labeled an apostate, which is even more serious. If these dangers were ever unclear to Raif Badawi, he must be vividly aware of them now.

If Voltaire or Thomas Jefferson or David Hume had been told that this sort of thing would still be a common occurrence in the 21st century, I wonder what they would have thought. I suspect that Voltaire and Jefferson would have been skeptical, but probably not Hume.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. It's probably worth adding that legal prosecutions for blasphemy are by no means limited to Muslim-majority countries (though their governments have taken the lead in promoting world-wide anti-blasphemy legislation in international forums). On the other hand, I don't know of any non-Islamic countries where apostasy is now treated as a capital crime. Are there examples that I'm not aware of?

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research.. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and is currently a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)